July 29, 2009

Championship Brand Tinkering

There are many flavors of baloney floating around the ad world these days. There's "digital" baloney, there's "conversation" and "engagement" baloney, but the biggest, most pervasive, and most dangerous form of baloney is still "branding" baloney.

...tinkering with the brand is way more fun than solving real business problems.

Solving problems requires unpleasantness. Floors have to be swept and walls have to be painted. People have to be fired. Systems have to be changed. Products have to be redesigned.

Brand tinkering, on the other hand, is generally quite agreeable. All it requires is money and a bunch of congenial meetings. Hire some branding consultants. Appoint a task force. Interview "stakeholders." ...Best of all, if there's any real work to be done, it'll be done by the consultants...

Unfortunately, after the money is spent and the naval-gazing brand babblers have gone home, someone still has to sweep the floor and paint the walls.

It looks to me like Pepsi-Cola Co. are becoming the all-time champion brand tinkerers.

We all know about the Tropicana "re-branding" disaster they went through earlier this year. Their Pepsibranding document, courtesy of Arnell, was the laughing stock of the industry a few months ago. And now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that their re-branding of Gatorade to "G" has been another nightmare.

According to the WSJ, Gatorade sales dropped over 17% in the first six months of this year, and they lost 4.5% share of the sports-drink market. That's a lot to lose in 6 months.

It seems like the brand babblers have taken over at Pepsi, and they are screwing it up royally.

It will take a while (like it does in all big organizations) for someone with a brain to realize what's been going on. While the tinkerers have been pissing away zillions on their crazy branding projects, it looks to an outsider like no one's been sweeping the floors or painting the walls.

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."